Abstract

Malaysia has adopted a method of policing, which is similar to the British’s Neighborhood Policing Teams (NPTs) called as Community-Oriented Policing (COP) in Malaysia. Community-oriented policing has been introduced to create a safer living environment. This concept is based on a partnership between police department and the communities, in which both parties will share the responsibility to identify, reduce, eliminate and prevent problems concerning community safety and order. Therefore, the spirit of community empowerment, smart ship, and interdependency between all stakeholders, including community, police, NGOs, and other interested parties are very much needed in this country through active and passive ways.

INTRODUCTION

Community-oriented policing is consider as an attractive contemporary policing approach responding to the decay in public trust in the police and growing indication that police capabilities could not fight crime by themselves ( Skogan, 2006; Fridell, 2004). Many terms have been used more or less synonymously with community-oriented policing, such as police-community relations, the back-to-the–community movement, problem-oriented policing, community-based policing, community-based crime prevention, citizen’s coproduction of community safety, team policing, neighborhood policing, neighborhood watch, community wellness, and crime control policing. According to Das ( 1986), many of these terms mean cooperatives or symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and the community. Whether one calls community policing a philosophy, a strategy, a model or paradigm, it is a complex set of ideas that simply cannot be put into a simple one-sentence definition. Community policing is considered as a popular contemporary policing approach responding to the decline in public confidence in police; and growing evidence that police forces cannot fight crime by themselves ( Skogan, 2006; Fridell, 2004).

Community-oriented policing is a popular reform, but has paid little attention to the challenges of implementation ( Mastrofski et al., 2007), which is often said to be fraught with problems and challenges for some reasons. However, community-oriented policing is a long-term process that involves fundamental institutional change. Scholar Vaughn ( 1991) has warned the police managers that “if you approach the community-oriented policing as a program, you will likely fail”. It redefines the role of the police officer on the street,

from crime fighter to problems solver and neighborhood ombudsman. Usually, Police is known as a government agency principally responsible for law enforcement, and it focuses on several cases of crime, especially those with high values, such as bank robbery and those involving violence. However, the new concept of community-oriented policing is a concept whereby the police are the public and the public is the police, and besides, police officers are those who are paid to provide full attention to the duties of every resident. According to Jenny Coquilhat through her research on Community Policing: An International Literature Review ( 2008), she has agreed with Carrol Buracker and Associates Ltd ( 2007) that there are four barriers to community-oriented policing implementation which are i) the police officer /organization, ii) The residents/community, iii) Police Culture, and iv) Specialized units.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The move towards community-oriented policing has gained momentum in recent years as police and community leaders search for more effective ways to promote the concept as to enhance the quality of life in their neighborhoods. The Ministry of Home Affairs, Non-Government Organization (NGO), and other policing officials are currently assessing what changes in orientation, organization, and operation will allow them to benefit the communities they serve by improving the quality of service and mechanism they enforce and provide.

The government of Malaysia tries to allocate more resources towards fighting crime and establishing more agencies to review police rules and conduct and investigate public complaints. The need to achieve greater efficacy in the delivery of police service led them to seek support and legitimacy within and from the public.

Thus, the spirit of community empowerment, smartship, and interdependency between all stakeholders, including the community, police, NGOs, and other interested parties are very much needed in this country through active and inactive ways.

THE AIM OF RESEARCH

This paper conducted research to identify the barriers and idea of improvement towards Community Oriented Policing (COP) success in Malaysia especially in Pulau Pinang.

METHOD OF RESEARCH

This study employed quantitative methodology through survey design and using questionnaire as an instrument. The research instrument was adopted with minor modification to meet the context of this study. Bahaman ( 2009) had conducted a study on the effectiveness of community participation in Volunteer Patrol Scheme on selected residential areas in Peninsular Malaysia. Suffian ( 2013) also conducted the same research study on members of Rakan COP who registered voluntarily. It was found that there are a total of 73, 786 members who were enrolled in Rakan COP Kuala Lumpur, while there are 240, 323 members across the country. Bahaman had set the criteria of the sample with the assistance of Kuala Lumpur Police Headquarters. The criteria were that the respondents in this study must be a) a Malaysian citizen; b) staying, studying or working in selected focus areas and c) registered as members of Rakan COP. As a result, Suffian ( 2013) had selected 384 respondents based on Krejcie and Morgan ( 1970) formula which is if the population size (n) is in the range of 75, 000 – 100, 000, the total sample required is 384 respondents which is equivalent to 0.5% only. Bahaman selected his location based on verbal discussion with Kuala Lumpur Police Headquarters. The selected location areas were namely i) Sentul; ii) Dang Wangi; iii) Brickfields; iv) Bangsar and v) Cheras. Data were distributed and collected in May 2009 using self-administered survey.

As for this research study, the population samples were drawn from selected neighborhood areas in Pulau Pinang that are implementing community oriented policing in the neighborhood. Based on data from Ibu Pejabat Polis Daerah (IPD), Daerah Timur Laut, there are six ( 6) housing schemes that are implementing community-oriented policing in their housing schemes, which are: i) Bandar Sri Pinang; ii) Pulau Tikus; iii) Bayan Baru; iv) Pantai Jerjak; v) Relau; and vi) Green Lane. The calculations of sample (N) for this study were adopted from scholar and researcher Yamanae, T. ( 1973). As a result, 2,032 respondents from 23, 517 people were selected as a sample for the research study which is equivalent to 8. 63%. It is considered higher than the previous research conducted by Suffian on his research study “The Effectiveness Level of the Rakan COP in Malaysia”.

However, for a professional interview with the Police Officers, the researcher developed 18 questions together with the checklist. The questions were directly asked to the Police Officers in charge about the strategies that were used to implement Community-Oriented Policing in Pulau Pinang. The researcher also indirectly asked the human relationship between the Police Officers and the Community residents in the questions of the survey interview. In this research study, the researcher tried to manipulate the respondents by indirectly asking the Community residents and the Police Officers about their human relationship. It was to prevent the tendency of bias answers from the respondents.

In order to strengthen the questionnaire, the researcher also conducted a desk research to obtain secondary data. Desk research was done through newspaper archives, internet, and books to retrieve the view of the research design.

LITERATURE REVIEW

There are four barriers to community-oriented policing identified by Carrol Buracker and Associate Ltd ( 2007).

The Police Officer/Organization

There are some reasons why the police officers and the organization pose a barrier to community-oriented policing. Community policing ‘... requires a great deal of training, close supervision, strong analytical capacity and organization’s wide commitment’ ( Skogan and Steiner, 2004).

The police officer: A National Center for Community-oriented Policing study found that in three of four initiatives, community-oriented policing is conducting without the contribution of the community to identify, prioritize, and solve problems ( Bucqueroux, 2007). It is possible for community police officers to work independently of the community when identifying and providing solutions to community issues. The second barrier concerning to the police officer is that their performance measures are based on enforcement type organizational measures rather than their aptitude to build relationships with the community, which results in the inability to reward an officer's good work ( Polzin, 2007; Greene, 2000; Skogan and Hartnett, 1998; Skolnick and Bayley, 1988).

Training: Carroll Buracker and Associates Ltd ( 2007) suggest that most officers are not trained in the formation of partnerships; nor do they have experience in organizing community involvement or empowering the community. With limited training, it is unlikely that police will realize the full potential of community-oriented policing. Skogan ( 2006) suggests that training is often ‘short-changed’ because community policing is labor intensive. Meanwhile, Mastrofski ( 2006) argues that in the United States, recruit training has not been substantially revised to promote community-oriented policing techniques. Moreover, Greene ( 2000) highlights the fact that generally less than one week is devoted for American police officers to learn and function in new police ‘thinking roles’ and if results can be achieved with limited training, then the question of whether success comes from a program/organization or due to the individual officer.

Sustaining organizational commitment: Skogan and Hartnett ( 1998) argue that one of the key barriers to community-oriented policing be sustaining organizational commitment. They discuss 11 experimental projects in which only one continued. Based on this one project, Skogan and Hartnett concluded that where there is sustained commitment and community ownership, the result is a decline in levels of crime, social disorder, and physical decay. The reasons for the remaining projects to be terminated included i) increasing pressure to respond to surging calls for service, ii) opposition from officers and mid-level management, and iii) the cessation of funding.

In addition, Young and Tinsley ( 1998) suggest that traditional police structures have done little to foster the acceptance of responsibility for analyzing a problem and seeking a resolution. Meanwhile, Mastrofski ( 2006) criticizes the general lack of a ‘whole-of-police’ approach with community-oriented policing, whereas Polzin ( 2007) argues that the police need to employ change management strategies to successfully implement community-oriented policing. Similarly, Goldstein (1993 - cited in Flynn, 2004) indicates that:

"The initiatives associated with community policing cannot survive in a police agency managed in traditional ways. If changes are not made, the agency sets itself up for failure ... Officers will not be creative ... if a high value continues to be placed on conformity. They will not be thoughtful if they are required to adhere to regulations that are thoughtless. Moreover, they will not aspire to act like mature, responsible adults if their superiors treat them like children."

Polzin ( 2007) believes for community-oriented policing to be successful, all barriers need to be identified during the design phase of community-oriented policing initiatives. Some of the common organizational barriers include i) lack of involvement by police management in the initiative's design, implementation, and monitoring, ii) disagreements about resource allocation and personnel deployment, iii) confusion or disagreement about changes in department systems and structures, iv) middle management indifference, v) clashes between ‘command-and-control’ management styles and expanded decision-making by line officers; and vi) preferential treatment for community police officers.

The Residents/Community

Community involvement and engagement are fundamental concepts to community-oriented policing. However, sustained community involvement and the different community engagement mechanisms have been identified as barriers to community-oriented policing.

Sustained community involvement: The ability to sustain commitment from the community and external agencies has been identified as a barrier to community-oriented policing. Community-oriented policing is highly dependent upon community involvement, but maintaining their sustainability has been an issue ( Skogan and Hartnett, 1998). Residents, unlike the agencies involved, are not paid, and to participate, must take time away from work, family, friends, daily chores, and personal interests ( Carroll Buracker and Associates Ltd, 2007).

Besides, community policing often implies that individuals have common interests, values, integrity, demands and expectations, but in practice, communities are ambiguous ( Skolnick and Bayley, 1988). Skogan ( 2006) further argues that community involvement not be easily achieved in areas of most need and harder to reach parts of the community can become excluded in the ‘community effort' because they have different interests, values, and expectations. On top of that, Segrave and Ratcliffe ( 2004) argue that community-oriented policing serve the interests of the vocal minority, as well as the presence of strong personalities and influential groups that can dominate discussions and control the direction of an initiative. Other factors that can limit community participation are in the addressing issues. For example, the ethos of individualism may undercut attempts to work in partnership with police. In addition, poor of capital investment is seen as a lack of social investment ( Herbert, 2006). Herbert questions if economically and socially disparate communities are capable of generating and sustaining themselves as ‘communities' under the expectations the normative ideals of community-oriented policing. The conflicting values are also a problem for agencies working together.

The poor of sustained interagency cooperation is because agencies have traditionally viewed community-oriented policing to belong to police rather than a community-wide responsibility ( Skogan, 2006). Moreover, Thacher ( 2001) argues that working in partnership can result in conflicting values and different social values being promoted by different agencies, which create the inability to work effectively together.

Community engagement mechanisms: Community meetings have been identified as a mechanism for the community to identify and to prioritize their problems, but have been proven difficult to sustain. The CAPS initiative experienced difficultly in sustaining resident involvement because the police have often dominated the solution with enforcement-oriented approaches, limiting productive dialogue between police and residents ( Skogan and Hartnett, 1998). Besides, Young and Tinsley ( 1998) believe that in New Zealand, formal community consultation committees were not successful for similar reasons: the police dominated the meetings, with the focus on either issues or concerns raised by police or on issues of which police had little knowledge of or regarded as outside the scope of their work. In addition, the formal consultative meetings were unrepresentative and poorly attended.

Other than that, Mastrofski et al., ( 2006) argue that beat meetings are intended to help community prioritize, participate in problem-solving, and discuss police services, which were not successful in engaging collective self-help behavior. Instead, meetings become a place to advocate for more service delivery. However, Bucqueroux ( 2004) argues that communities need to beempowered and undertake training to enable them to lead in problem-solving. Nonetheless, Mastrofski ( 2006) raises an interesting research question: what does the community expect from the community-oriented policing? If more were understood about community expectations, then they could be incorporated into the development of initiatives.

Police Culture

Traditional law enforcement and criminal justice practices cause lack of sympathy in understanding community-oriented policing ( Young and Tinsley, 1998). Ideas of ‘solidarity’ or ‘brotherhood’ are important in understanding the resistance to community-oriented policing. It is thought the police officers develop the need to protect one another against signs of trouble, offense or threat and perceived of danger ( Skolnick and Bayley, 1988). Besides, Skogan ( 2006) claims that there is resistance to community-oriented policing within the ranks because it is seen as soft policing or ‘social work’ and ‘just politics’ due to the involvement from public officials. Moreover, some officers do not like civilian influence on operational priorities.

In addition, Scott and Jobes ( 2007) believe that traditional police are ‘formally trained and informally socialized’ through the bureaucracy of law enforcement, which provides a counter to community-oriented policing and community engagement. However, police culture is often resistant to change towards community-oriented policing for several reasons, including the potential loss of autonomy; there could be diversion of resources from traditional core functions; the community could impose unrealistic program, and police ‘tough-minded' status could be demeaned ( Greene, 2000; Skogan and Hartnett, 1998).

Furthermore, the police culture can undermine police-community relationships because police officers dominate as ‘crime and disorder experts’, which gives disadvantages to the community when offering solutions. Bucqueroux ( 2004) believes police are doing a good job of engaging with the community for help and support but are still reluctant to share power and decision-making with them. Furthermore, Herbert ( 2006) argues police often decide on the terms of engagement for various social problems because of the separation from the community due to their duties and powers, which disempowers the community and limits their involvement.

Specialized Units

On top of that, Carroll Buracker and Associates Ltd ( 2007) argue that the effectiveness of community policing become limited when community police operate as specialized units. Specialized units can create an environment of isolation or cause friction between staff. More successful community policing initiatives have incorporated a ‘whole of organization' approach. However, the implementation of a ‘whole of organization' approach is often problematic ( Cordner, 1999).

Officer’s work in isolation: Community police officers are likely to suffer isolation within the organization where community-oriented policing is delivered through specialist officers (e.g. community constables) or through dedicated units ( Young and Tinsley, 1998). Working in specialized units can cause difficulties in establishing creditability and gaining status amongst colleagues who are still largely driven by law enforcement and criminal justice practices. The authors believe that: “... if problem-solving and responsibility for crime prevention are assigned to specialized units without fundamental change in the rest of policing, the predominant philosophy and culture of the organization will almost inevitably remain unchanged and crime-related problems, which are identified or observed in the course of patrol or investigative work or through community contact, will be only fitfully addressed” ( Young and Tinsley, 1998).

However, Young and Tinsley suggest this issue may be mitigated with support from management and by rewarding successful problem-solving through community partnership.

Workplace friction: In some cases, specialized community-oriented policing units have caused major friction between the beat officer and the community police officer ( Carroll, Buracker and Associates Ltd, 2007; Patterson, 2007). Much of this friction is because of the differences in practices: community police officers typically choose their hours, working Monday to Friday; they are provided with increased and new resources, such as cars; they may have limited experience in the police force; and – of more concern – there is often no job description developed ( Carroll, Buracker and Associates Ltd, 2007).

IDEAS OF IMPROVEMENT

The researchers have developed and produced a set of recommendations in order to improve community-oriented policing strategies implementation and development in Pulau Pinang. Hence, the idea is to look into a wide scope of implementations such as the police department policies, and political view.

There are several processes to generate and to develop ideas and solutions. The first process is to understand the findings and issues from the data collection. In the research study, six issues have been identified based on the data collection from the survey and interviews. The issues which have been identified are namely; community is lacking of information, explanation, education, and understanding on community-oriented policing strategies and implementation which has led to negative perception and lack of participation in community-oriented policing development and implementation.

There is no doubt that plentiful information regarding community-oriented policing strategies and development has been published in the PDRM website, social media, newspapers and other mass media. However, this information did not explain enough or in the right way to the public. It may need more efforts from related parties to explain about the community-oriented policing. The best way to explain to the public is to educate the public by showing and demonstrating it to them so that the public will be able to understand it.

The recommendations are based on the issues and problems identified from the research findings. The recommendations are generated as the solution to solve and to give the ideas to improve community-oriented policing concept and strategies. Some of the ideas were adopted from the reading and previous case study and modified to conform with the issues and problems identified in the previous chapter. The researcher has listed and analyses five recommendations that can be applied to improve community-oriented policing implementation in Malaysia especially in Pulau Pinang namely i) encouraging volunteer; ii) communicating with the public on crime; iii) improving satisfaction with the police; iv) educate and training program; and v) Conduct research into strategies and tactics.

Encouraging Volunteer

Even if we can reduce crime, we must also counter public perception of the level of crime, which can remain unchanged and can sometimes even worsen while the actual crime figures are decreasing. Increasing public participation in crime awareness and prevention activities contributes towards increasing their general awareness and improving their sense of security. In addition, it is important to encourage the public as a community to volunteer in such program like community policing or any other community-oriented program, which is collaboration with the authorities such as police department or other local law enforcement authorities.

As a result, public who has volunteered to help the police to fight crime will naturally feel more in control of their environment. Government as authorities should expand current schemes, such as Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia, Skim Rondaan Sukarela, and Rakan Cop, and work with more groups, such as Residents' Associations (RAs), Rukun Tetangga and the community policing committee to harness the energies of their members into fighting crime.

The expansion of Rakan Cop, an existing scheme where people can register for membership by SMS, and then act as the eyes and ears of the police. The public can then inform the police of any criminal activity or suspicious behaviour via SMS. This scheme should be expanded through broad promotions to encourage greater enrolment and to educate people on the types of information that is useful for the police. Public or residents may not have a time for volunteer activities such as patrol beat, but with Rakan Cop program, at least the community can become like an “eagle” eye of the police at anytime and anywhere even outside of Bandar Sri Pinang residential area.

Skim Rondaan Sukarela (SRS) which is a voluntary activity under Rukun Tetangga should be promoted actively to the residents especially by encouraging all local male residents to be involved in the scheme. Also, Department of National Unity and National Integration (JPNIN) should allocate vests and operational equipment to the members of the SRS while on duty as an incentive to increase participation of the community residents. There should be a systematic duty roaster to arrange the beats or patrol duty at night. According to KPL 91898 Ayoob Sulaiman (The Police Officer of Jalan Patani, District Headquarters, Timur Laut District, Pulau Pinang) who is involved with the community policing program in Bandar Sri Pinang has suggested that there should be two shifts and more than two groups of the community to patrol at night in their residential area. In addition, according to KPL 91898 Ayoob Sulaiman the patrol should start at 10 p.m until 6 a.m. because it is believed as the best time for crime to happen.

Crime-Free Day is one of the best initiatives involving a joint effort of PDRM and RAs to reduce crime and to educate the public on the importance of getting involved in crime prevention. It will help to show to the public especially Bandar Sri Pinang community residents that the police department are being serious about reducing crime and to encourage their participation. In addition, there should be talks and exhibitions on preventing crime by PDRM and NGOs such as the Malaysian Crime Prevention Foundation (MCPF).

According to the KPL 91898 Ayoob Sulaiman, the government will rebrand RELA through Skuad Muda RELA, which is an initiative to attract more people aged from 15 to 40 years old to join RELA. This will not only bolster the capacity of the police service, but it will also involve the public in the efforts to reduce crime. The Ministry of Youth & Sports and RELA will collaborate to select suitable willing candidates to undergo seven-days basic RELA training. After the training, successful candidates will be invited to join RELA. Trainees who are older than 18 years old with the highest potential and interest will be invited to become part of RELA's Police Volunteer Reserve (PVR). In addition, according to the Government Transformation Programme, Roadmap Executive Summary 2010, RELA membership now stands at over 600,000 while the membership of Jabatan Pertahanan Awam Malaysia (JPAM) has grown from 28,000 in 2004 to over 67,000 in 2009. However, it is important that these organizations to reflect on the diversity of the public, e.g., to recruit more non-Bumiputera.

Communicating with the Public on Crime

The authorities should increase advertisement promoting crime prevention and crime enforcement across a variety of broadcast, and interactive media will help the public to reduce their fear of crime, to engage with the PDRM directly and to reduce susceptibility to criminal acts.

The PDRM’s Public Affairs officers should collaborate with the Ministry of Information, Communications and Culture (KPKK) and media agencies to inform the public of ongoing and special initiatives. Notable successes achieved by the PDRM should be publicized, to increase public confidence and to boost the PDRM's morale. According to Mr. Lim (Bandar Sri Pinang CP committee president), there have been many activities and conferences between the CP Committee members and the police department which have never been published by any media. As a result, the numbers of participants seemed to be a bit stumpy.

Therefore, a Mobile Police Vehicles (MPV’s) and collaboration with community policing committee should stop and talk to people on the ground for at least 10-15 minutes of every hour during regular patrols to the public in residential development. Talking to the public includes gathering information, getting feedback and providing information, e.g., sharing flyers on crime prevention tips or local police contact details. This will give the general public more opportunities to raise concerns with the police and get to know their local officers. It will also build public trust in the police department, helping to address the feedback received from some of the public during PDRM’s Open Days that they feared and mistrust the police.

Improving Public Satisfaction with the Police

Interactions with individual police officers greatly influence public's perception of PDRM as a whole. Public opinion is also formed through other types of exposure, e.g., word of mouth and mass media. Currently there are no comprehensive assessments of public satisfaction with the police or of their customer service, such as the assistance received at the police stations and timeline of response to distress calls.

Therefore, the government should launch an independent survey to gauge public satisfaction with the police department. According to one of the respondents, this survey should be repeated every six months to monitor changes in public satisfaction as to improve the police department services.

According to the review of the questionnaire survey distributed to the community residents, the researcher has found that public satisfaction with the police department is largely driven by three elements. The three elements are 1) response time to a distress call, 2) ease of lodging a police report, and 3) effectiveness in addressing crime.

Based on the elements, the government should devise initiatives to help to increase public satisfaction with the police department. The initiatives are such as a combination of measures to ease public interactions with the police, enable the police to help the public more efficiently and to motivate the police department to improve overall performance by ensuring their well-being and offering performance-linked incentives.

1. Implement the first response: Pulau Pinang state government should implement the first response via motorbike so that police officers can arrive quickly at crime scenes. This initiative builds on existing efforts that are seeing early positive results in some major property developments (e.g., Ara Damansara by Sime Darby), where police patrols use motorbikes in secluded areas and back lanes, which are often susceptible to crimes.
2. Reintroducing POL55: Let the public to report crimes to policemen on patrol to make it easier for the public, by reintroducing the POL55, which will allow uniformed personnel to take police reports manually. Steps should be taken to ensure that these reports are recorded into the Police Reporting System (PRS) immediately and are not misplaced or lost. Besides increasing convenience, it is hoped that this method will help the police to gather more intelligence as people can easily approach a policeman on regular patrol rather than going to the nearby police station.
3. Increase the well-being of the police: The demands made on police personnel to reduce crime and to ensure public satisfaction must be supported by initiatives that enable them to live a comfortable life and to perform their duties without fear or favour. An important way to achieve this is by improving their overall well-being. Some of the methods being considered include providing adequate housing and allowances (geography-based), counselling services and potentially insurance policies to support and protect their families (e.g., life and disability insurance).
4. High profile policing involvement: High profile policing involves senior police officers (ranked Inspector and above) participating in walkabouts in commercial areas, streets and residential areas. Dressed in full uniform, they should patrol together with beat policemen and community-oriented policing committee members for at least three hours a week. Their presence will help to reassure the public about the commitment of the PDRM’s senior leadership to tackle crime. In addition, it will motivate regular beat policemen and community-oriented policing committee member, who will see their superiors actively involved at the sharp end of policing participation in these patrols.
5. Refinement and expansion of Feet on Street programme: Police, supported by volunteers, should patrol in hot spots to deter criminals and to reassure the general public. A special program should be implemented through the Police Volunteer Reserve (PVR), which should absorb members of the RELA, JPAM and the community policing committee to participate in regular patrols, thus increasing police omnipresence. This initiative should also include the auxiliary police and the SUKSIS ( Undergraduate Police Voluntary Corps).
6. Educate and Training Program

Develop and implement a comprehensive education and training program to canvass the shift in policing focus from a predominantly reactive to more proactive style. This education and training program should accommodate both police department as well as community members.

The concept of community-oriented policing entailed a partnership arrangement, and the utilization of this partnership is to identify and come up with the solutions for community problems. The partnership arrangement involves both police department and community members and such arrangement requires both parties to have a commonality of understanding concerning the policing concept for it to be successfully implemented. As the terms "partnership" implies, both parties must contribute and participate equally unless the pertaining issue requires specific police involvement. Therefore, as one of the foundation blocks to successfully implementing the policing concept, both police department and community need to be exposed to appropriate education and training packages that promote the understanding of the concept of "community-oriented policing".

However, this education and training arrangement should not be considered as a “one-off” exercise but should be developed to provide regular updates about the residential area. In addition, the successful implementation of police-community strategies in addressing local community problems should be utilized as experiential learning across the whole police department.

In Texas, the Texas Police Department has introduced a program called the Huston citizen patrol program in which members of the community will assist the police department in crime prevention matters. This program is specially designed to allow members of the community group to carry out patrols to reduce crime in local areas. The police department will assist the community by providing training and equipment such as radio and trademarks. This program is considered successful with the assistance and close cooperation between the police department and community members. Huston Police Department as stated in Priest and Carter ( 1999) showed that 80 civil patrol groups in Huston with more than 3, 100 volunteers had undergone more than 82, 000 of patrol per person in 1991.

There is another campaign, which is also commenced in the United States, the "McGruff" Crime Prevention Campaign. The objective of this campaign is to spark a sense of responsibility in each individual in an effort to prevent crime, to educate the community to take joint preventive measures, change the mind-set of the people to work with the non-governmental body (NGOs) on the prevention of crime. In the study conducted for this campaign in 1991 by Matera and Artique ( 2000), found that 88% of crime prevention enforcement personnel were involved in this campaign while the awareness among community members was 80%. In addition, 86% embraced the campaign activities and responded positively with things that they had learned from it.

Conduct Research into Strategies and Tactics

Conduct research into strategies and tactics that can be adopted to maintain and/or promote a sense of community association by incorporating the police department and enhancing the quality of life (QoL) within the community.

This recommendation is linked to those previously mentioned. By conducting research into strategies for promoting community association in the residential area, police department will be able to develop best practice tactics to enhance areas of resourcing activities, crime prevention, including "fear of crime" reduction and enhancement of quality of life (QoL). The research will also form the basis of reviewing and maintaining the currency of the education and training component for implementing the community-oriented policing concept.

The Community-Oriented Policing in Pulau Pinang as a policing program endeavouring to implement a revised policing focus, the need to market the concept, to educate all persons involved and the implementation process. Otherwise, the implementation process will only amount to a piecemeal and "ad hoc" arrangement providing only minimal success.